If you’re not taking your passion and turning it into a blog, if you’re just blogging to start a business, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Some people feel they need to be passionate about their blog before they can get started. That’s complete B.S. A blog can be a passion project. But unless you start treating it like a business, you’re not going to make any money.

A blog that’s not a business is nothing more than a hobby. And while hobbies are great, they’re money pits.

You need ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. Blogs are about words and ideas. And if you don’t have quality content, your readers are going to find it elsewhere. So, today I’m going to lay down all the ideas you can handle. And remember, this is just grab bag, it’s your job to jump off from here. Just let me know when you hit the jackpot at the end.

1. Do a Blog About Your Dreams and Goals

Here’s a thing: you’re most likely pretty average. You’re not a genius and that’s ok. But you’re you. You’re unique. And your goals are probably unique.

Catalog every day you work on your goals. Create a plan for each day so people know you’re working on something. And then post updates on social media.

2. Start a Thought Journal

Seriously, start a thought journal. And then at the end of each day, write a comprehensive post exploring your daily thoughts. If you’ve lived any amount of life, you most likely have accumulated some sort of wisdom. It’s time to share that with the world.

You can even use Twitter as your journal. Whenever you have a #showerthought, post it on Twitter with that self-same hashtag. And then you can actually post something every once in a while to r/showerthoughts and watch your stuff go viral.

3. Publish Your To-Do Lists

Ok, this one might be pretty inane. But if you’re creative you can find humor or wisdom in the most mundane tasks. If you’re good at finding the interesting bits of life, create to-do lists and then comment on them.

You never know where your brain might take you.

4. Critique the News

While the President has weaponized the concept of #fakenews, no journalist should be above criticism. You might want to be careful with this one. You could bring a lot of ire down on your head, but the news is full of controversy these days.

Pick a side to each news piece and start picking away. You’ll soon have a 1500 word article and not even realize you spent so much time. And the best thing about critiquing any work of writing, you can use quotes to fill up space!

5. Talk About Other Bloggers (Positively)

One of the best ways to build your blog is by praising other bloggers. You could spend all your time reviewing other people’s blogs.

It’s probably one of the most meta things you could do, but here’s the awesome thing: when you review a blog, you’re linking to it. And if that blog is paying attention, they’ll see the link and follow it back to your blog.

If you’re doing a great job of reviewing and giving good feedback, they might decide to link back to your own blog. If you drum up enough authority, you might get other bloggers asking for your reviews.

Just a quick aside: when creating your blog, you should read more on hosting services. Just saying. Ok, onward!

6. A Blog of Case Studies

The internet is full of cases studies. While the Nof1 can be deceiving, seeing what one company did right or wrong can be useful to some. It’s a nutshell way of sharing wisdom through anecdotes.

How do you find case studies? It really depends on the topic, but if you’re an entrepreneur, you can find case studies on sites like Entrepreneur, Inc.com, The Economist, and more.

Now, you don’t want to steal content from those sites. Use them as a springboard to do your research. Find a case study on there and improve upon their own research.

7.  Become a Guest Post Platform

If you have been blogging for a while and you have a substantial readership, it might be time to open your blog up to guest posters. If you’re able to keep the quality of your posts high enough, this might be a fairly low-maintenance way of continuing your content creation strategy.

Be sure you post rules about guest posting. And be discerning. You might want to charge for companies that want to directly advertise rather than link to actual content. And you want to keep these spammy links to a minimum if you don’t want to tank your SEO.

8. Travel, Write, and Blog About Making Money

Now, this market could very well be saturated. Do your research before jumping down this rabbit hole. But I’ve seen some pretty successful blogs just blogging about the money they make while blogging and freelancing.

They’re often digital nomads and they also disseminate advice on how to be a digital nomad when they’re not bragging about the money they’ve been making.

9. A Joke Blog

If you’re incredible at coming up with jokes or if you just had a steady diet of joke books from the time you were a kid until your 30s, it’s time to get a life. Write them out.

Be careful with this one. You could be floating into copyright territory. So make sure all your jokes are original or their copyright has expired.

 

By Ben Mattice

Benjamin Mattice is a freelance writer/editor, horror and sci-fi writer, SEO and affiliate marketing newbie, dog wrestler, cat wrangler, capoeirista, and long distance runner. He lives in the Palouse with his wife, three dogs, two cats, and two rats. Yes, that would probably be considered a mini-zoo.